AI Art Community Newsletter

Happy Friday & Happy New Year folks!! Welcome to newsletter # 36 ❤️ Grab some hot cocoa and settle in… we’ve got new news in AI & art + abominations, memes, daily champs and more…

🗞️ AI News

An unending fount of newness from the AI world. Thank you to twilight_dreams123 and @barbara.chira.ai.art who provided a few links below!

• Midjourney is starting work on their video model this month

• Sleuthing in 2022 Midjourney discord shows conversations around copyright between CEO David and other users / engineers. A database of 16,000 artists used to train Midj. Here’s an article about the incident.

• For Midjourney 10k users, generating in Discord no longer serves a purpose. All key features are available through the alpha site, and in a much more intuitive fashion. Nice tweet from Nickfloats walking through the changes.

• Artists are poisoning their work to disrupt image generation models like Stable Diffusion - the main prompt potions are called Nightshade, Glaze and Aspose

• Not AI, but artistically relevant! The Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain, after 95 years of Disney copyright. Mickey changed the course of copyright law in the US with Disney successfully lobbying for an extra 40 years of ownership. That article includes a 1m video about the event.

• Leonardo AI raises $31M, Perplexity AI raises $73M, Replicate raises $40M (aka - these tools will just keep getting better!)

Not art, still noteworthy

• This guy made an AI-powered mouthpiece that acts as a mouse for a computer

• Thoughtful article about what separates the algorithms underpinning Generative AI from human intelligence

• Page 5 of this study shows a list of 26 ways to better prompt LLMs. My favorite: “I’m going to tip $xxx for a better solution!!” 😂

• Awesome video about the first person in Tetris’ 34-year history to beat the game by arriving at the fabled “true kill screen” (i.e. a level so high that the code fails and the game breaks). They use some AI in here for game simulations!

• Korean airlines uses AI in their pre-takeoff safety video.

• Cool-looking new personal AI computer, Gal 

Got a link? Just reply or join us in #AI News in Discord.

Whirl 🌀

New Release: 1.19 🎊

Last week, we released home screen stats. Today, image generation. 🎉 Release 1.19 features:

• Create images with state-of-the-art DALL-E 3.

• Post a generated image to the daily theme or to your profile.

• Filter images by ⭐️ starring them. Re-roll prompts. Zoom in.

• Browse the community feed and easily try out each other’s prompts.

Gain image credits by maintaining your daily theme streak, leveling up, gaining new badges, etc! You’ll also earn image credits as a community by reaching certain milestones. For example, active today: if total submissions in a given daily theme exceeds 100, everyone who participated in that theme gets image credits.

DALL-E 3 is 2-4x as expensive as DALL-E 2, and DALL-E 2 was already more expensive than other image gen APIs. To offset those high costs, we’ve added a simple sponsorship spot that appears while images load. Always pre-vetted partners - and our first is the lovely… 🥁 MonAI 🎉!

For more release info (including bug fixes), check out “Release Notes” in your app or #new-releases in Discord.

👑 Daily Champs

Daily champs from Whirl this week!

“Yellow” - Co-champ - @ai.art.account

“Yellow” - Co-champ - @bradthedesigner

“Yellow“ - Co-champ - @interpretedspace

“Vibrant Color” - @thelefthandtree

“Impressionism“ - @ai.collections.art

“Monster’s Ball“ - @just.ai.img

“Haute Couture“ - @dalmatian_nation_ai

🏔️ Whirl Explore - Top 15

Each week in Whirl, a few posts make their way to the top of Explore that were not posted as part of the daily theme - dubbed the “Top 15“. Here are a few of them!

By @eric2159

By @catill2020

By @rino__world (Whirl)

Not part of the app?? Come on down → to whirl.

X Tips: Shockingly boring photos of everyday life, Scientific realism, Phosphorescent paint

X is full of great ways to learnt the ways of AI. Here are some super fun prompts to try!

No tip here, just a super cool smash cut AI video!

Weekly Abomination

Catdog? Voldemort?

From @dalmatian_nation_ai via #abominations channel in Discord

Fin

As always, many thanks to the Patron Saint squad: Mischief, Oracular_angel, whitehatgfx, momhugssss, danb3ach, Midjourney.portraits, Mauriciotonon, x0alliecat0X, troplanduniverse, Marcus (formerly catsndogs.ai), dreamingr0b0ts, evelynsaiart, adaaiart, freakydreams.ai. And now 200+ who’ve joined the ranks of Lvl 2 or Patron.

→ Consider supporting!

See you next week 🙂

❤️ - Jackson (connect on LinkedIn, if you’d lik